


Part two: "You couldn't tell it to his face."

by Anihan (Nakagami)



Series: Jim and John, and Moran watches on. [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Johann has a heart-to-heart with a criminal, She's really angry about everything, and kinda empty inside :(, but Jim won't let her wallow forever, it's time to do something about the situation, no
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-21 20:01:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/904307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nakagami/pseuds/Anihan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Title and chapter headings from Matt Corby's song Brother. Part two of three.</p><p>Summary: Three days, many arguments. This time, Johann fights back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Part two: "You couldn't tell it to his face."

~¥~

Silence is not a luxury enjoyed by this family. The sniper and the spider are engaged in a shouting match in the kitchen; the topic, a child. Their child, more or less.

The door to Johann's room is open and even if she weren't before, the girl is awake and listening to them argue now. She flinches at a particularly low tone, mainly because the words are delivered with enough acid to strip paint from a car, and she curls a bit deeper into a ball in order to protect herself from the words that aren't even sent in her direction.

She can only hear snippets, only Moran's anger, but the conversation is easy enough to put together. "I can't promise you much but I will promise you this, James: _You will not touch her again._ " 

A moment of Jim murmuring and then: "I don't care about your excuses and I don't care about your plans for the future! I brought her here to _save you_ , not for you to kill her, and I will take her away again if you cannot manage to control yourself for once."

"She's your last bloody hope and you had best start to treat her that way." A pause, more murmurs. "Yes, or with a little ruddy respect!"

There is a pained scream, the sort caused by pain from within and not by someone else, and Johann has just enough time to hope that he keeps his rage contained to the kitchen before something shatters out of sight with the sound of ceramic hitting a wall, not china, and the following series of smashes indicates the rest of the dinnerware meeting a similar fate.

But the crash of ceramic is the only sound to come from the kitchen besides Moran's hissed words for a long, long time.

Johann is listening. They must know this. It'd be hard to miss with her sitting right there at her desk, limbs folded close, head held high despite the bruises still forming. But some emotions are hard to tamp down and apparently snipers have a lot of feelings these days, not to mention Jim's emotions, whatever he is. Not that the supposed subject of their conversation understands half of it.

 _How am I meant to save him?_ She rages on the inside, poised on the out. Not a trickle of her viral dissatisfaction makes it through to the surface, but still, she feels it roil.  _There must be some way I could help him that the other John couldn't do, else I wouldn't be here, but really, I'm only twelve! What the hell?_

The stream of broken dishes has slowed to a trickle. A bowl, already broken, shatters against the far wall visible through Johann's doorway, and she stares at the impact site. _No._ Really, she thinks frantically. _What the hell is going on here?_

She doesn't wallow, though she does ache for answers. This is not what she signed on for. Not at all. _Where's Sherlock,_ she whines deep inside just the once, not a question but definitely a plea kept close to her heart. It's been nearly eight months since she left; surely someone's noticed she's been taken, not just gone? Someone has to have noticed by now!

There was no need to think ' _what if someone has noticed but they can't find me_ '. Similarly, she couldn't bear the thought of ' _what if no one noticed at all_ '. There was no need to think like that. Because _Sherlock's coming,_ she thinks fiercely, a demand from the damned. _He, she, it, they, all of them: it was a promise._ _They always will. She's coming for me. She'll come._

The kitchen is silent for a good three minutes of heavy panting. Every one of them is trying to find a balance, a bit of equilibrium, not that any of them are likely to attain it, the elusive calm before the storm.

 

And then Moran begins screaming at Jim again.

Johann shakes off her thoughts and goes to shut the door. The voice is muffled but still quite loud. "It's our lives you're messing with, all three of us are being fucked over by your games. Can't you see? It will be Game Over if you break all your toys." 

Jim is replying but Johann doesn't want to listen anymore. She goes to sleep. 

~*~

She is sitting - no, not sitting, sleeping - on her desk when Moran comes to get her the next morning, curled up in a sitting position with knees at her chest, hands wrapped possessively across her ankles with her eyes closed. Her head is leant against the wall in a way that leaves ample portions of chest and throat visible.

There is a line of neat little bruises down her neck in the shape of finger pads, ending at her suprasternal notch. For a minute, Moran just stares.

There’s nothing for it. A cleared throat and then Moran whispers gruffly, “Come on, get up. It’s lunchtime. You’re going to join us whether you wanna eat or not.”

She doesn't startle, so maybe she hadn’t been asleep after all. The assassin is actually impressed by how calmly she collects herself and realizes her surroundings, merely nodding her acknowledgement and stretching out stiff limbs.

The actions highlight her bruises, punctuated by wincing. She kneels on the surface of the desk and and tosses a pillow from the high-backed chair in front of it-- _W_ _hy hadn’t she been using it? Surely any pillow would have made it more comfortable._ The sniper muses but does not comment. –-to land a good three feet closer to the door. She steps down onto the chair and from the chair to the pillow, and then rummages around in the armoire for more things to create a path. 

Moran huffs a bit in amusement. “Why are you doing that? The game's over, you know. The floor's not lava anymore.”

"The floor is never not lava, Moran," the girl retorts, and she continues making a path to the kitchen by grasping spare bits of pillows and clothing from around the room and tossing them in front of her. She doesn’t pause once she reaches the doorway, stepping confidently from a ball gown to the tile of the kitchen without missing a beat, but her voice echoes back to where Moran is standing near her desk.

“The game is never over, Moran.”

Moran stares a bit. She goes to sit at the far side of the kitchen table without a word to Jim at the stove, even when he chirps, "Good morning! Did you sleep well?" The sniper watches her ignore Jim entirely, even when he fills her plate with potato and egg and moves to sit right next to her at the table. 

Jim asks how she slept. She ignores him. She stares directly back at Moran through the doorway to her room and doesn't acknowledge Jim's presence at all. 

 _If this is the new game,_ Moran thinks, but allows the thought to fall away without finishing it. The sentiment was true enough.

~¥~

Her gun stays in its holster for the next week, and although the holster moves closest to wherever she’s sleeping, Johann refuses to even take it out until the bruises fade, and even then she's reluctant to touch it.

Jim comes to speak with her about it on the third day.

“I know you’re angry,” he says. Matter-of-fact. “So I’m here to give you one free shot.” Jim motions for her to pick up the gun but she only stares. At it, not at him. 

God, that solution is alluring. Johann's drawn to it, you can see it in her eyes. 

But she can't do it, however much she wants to—There's no way she'd survive that kind of temptation, and what a seductive temptation it is...—but even now she doesn’t refuse his offer by saying so. The new game is not over yet. No, Johann doesn't even acknowledge his presence at her bedside, dangling a gun in her face and offering to let her shoot him.

She just waits in silence, mute and unresponsive, until he gets frustrated and leaves. 

 _God,_ she thinks, but she doesn't relax, not when she can see Jim cornering Moran in the kitchen. _Always there, always_  here, _always nearby!_ _That kitchen gets more action than a ten-pence whore during Mardi Gras._ (....Not that she quite knew what that phrase meant, but it was comforting to remember phrases like that being common vernacular. It reminds her of the days before Jim came into the picture. It reminds her of six months of feeling at home.) 

And that's when the yelling starts again.

"It's been a week of protest and still that girl refuses to talk to me! This is utterly ridiculous-- it's been days! I am her father!"

 _What the fuck,_ she thinks.  _Is this how he thinks kids should be raised?_  Even the concept makes her dizzy. Nauseous. Excited. She shoves it all down.

Moran's voice comes with a degree of calm that slowly breaks as the words beat it to the ground. "No, James, you're *not*. You are her kidnapper. And a man who has hurt her; a man who has put bruises on her, ones that haven't even healed. Look at it from her perspective for once. She's been taken from her bed, taken from her _family_ , her society, her entire world, and then placed in the care of a self-proclaimed movie-stylized empath!"

"Empath!" shrieks Jim, but Moran has really gotten worked up now. The sniper comes into Johann's line of sight and shoves Jim away, closer to the den with every sentence.

"Yes, James, an empath! Someone who feels the emotions of others? Although apparently you're a sociopathic one considering you have never _once_ respected the emotions you supposedly feel from her!" There is the sound of a fairly light body hitting a fairly heavy-duty wall, though Johann doesn't dare move to get a look, however much she wants to. "Don't give me that bullshit, Mister I-know-how-you-feel; Mister I'll-try-to-take-the-pain-away; Mister "your words hurt me more than I could ever do to you"! And then, Mister ground-sodding  _Empath_ , you throw it all in her face by actually attacking her when she'd only been trying to reach out to you!"

Mentioning that, it seems, was a faux pas. "SHE SPOKE ABOUT JOHN!"

"SHE _IS_ JOHN! You _idiot!_ "

The rant burns down to a simmer at that, and there is a tense moment while the two of them reign in their respective angers. Johann is practically trembling with everything she's heard, everything she's learned. No, wait. She  _is_ trembling, both hands impossible to keep still.  _How about that,_ she thinks with wonder. 

But if there's one thing she knows about Jim, it is that Jim will always pout theatrically through to the end. "I didn't say all that," he protests at last, and she lets out the breath she had been holding in an incredulous laugh.

"You most certainly did!" Moran screams.

"But I didn't say it *like* that," Jim corrects, and then yells over Moran's incoherent rage by continuing with, "And I certainly hadn't expected you to throw my feelings in my face afterward. How rude," he sighed in apparent disappointment. "Next time I just won't open up. Keep it all bottled in, then, shall I."

"Yes, Jim," Moran snaps. "Just do that. Keep your mouth shut next time."

"No."

"No?!"

"No, I just won't! John's perfect and she's mine and I won't give her up until she's either dead or has killed me." Jim shuffles his feet audibly and pouts again. "That was our agreement."

Shock widens Moran's eyes and horror crowns on the assassin's face. Johann can barely see it from her perch. "Are you completely mental? _She can hear you_!"

Jim pushes Moran back a step, coming into view. He doesn't look over but she gets the feeling that he's watching her anyway. "Then she'd better be listening well today because I won't say this again. I. Want. Her. In _chains_. At my feet." He gestures, illustrating something, but Johann doesn't see the details. "But John won't put up with that, and I don't want to break her, so you had best be finding me another solution-- one where she  _talks_  --or I will implement one that, well! None of us would like."

He smiles sweetly at that, and Moran glances at the door to her room and manages to catch her eyes. Something must be showing on her face because Moran stiffens uncomfortably and is at the door in an instant, slamming it shut.

Sleep wasn't forthcoming after that. 

Which is how they are brought to an impasse three hours later, with Johann holding a box of jewelry in the middle of her room and swaying like she's about to faint. The box hits the edge of the desk on the way down, flinging a gold and green choker halfway across the room. Jim makes a noise of protest but Moran, pacing the floor on the other side of the bed, shushes him.

It's not horror, the feeling welling up now as she looks down at the necklace. The feeling is not that easy to quantify. There's fear and surprise, emptiness too, but the most prevalent of her emotions is denial. You can bet your pretty little ass that there's an engraving somewhere on it that says  _Property of Jim Moriarty_ but she doesn't take the time to look for it before she blows up right in Jim's face. 

"This is your solution? A collar-- a fucking _collar_! What the hell is this, _BDSM Gone Wrong_? Who the fuck-- WHAT the fuck is wrong with you people!"

"Watch your tongue!" Moran snaps at the same time Jim chortles and asks, "Who taught you that kind of language, young lady? Certainly wasn't me."

"The Army," she snaps back, and throws her arms into the air in exasperation, fingers reaching into her hair to tug at the roots in blatant frustration. 

"You're twelve. You were never in the Army."

Johann waves a hand to indicate Moran, ignoring the hairs pulled out by the motion. She can't stop staring at the necklace. God, are those real emeralds? Real jade? "And yet I was raised on a military base!"

Moran interrupts before the squabble dissolves into name-calling. "You didn't hear about BDSM from me!"

"My Mum's a Domme," Johann retorts with a hiss, looking up at last, then rolls her eyes at Jim when it looks like he's about to say something snarky. "Not you, my REAL mom. With the whole nine hours in labour thing? And she was a good one, too, a good mom and a good Domme. She'd whoop your arse so good you'd *beg* for more, but you wouldn't like it. And you wouldn't do what she asked you not to again." The fire in her tone suggests she expects a similar response to her requests as well, not that she's gotten it here.

Jim looks half gleeful, half perturbed. He half sings, "But you haven't asked us to 'not do' anything yet!"

"Fine then!" She sucks in a breath that burns even before it gets to her lungs. There's desperation there, yeah, and rage, and it is about to come flying out. "But I won't ask something of you, I don't want any favours," she says in smouldering reluctance, every word torn from her by the bleeding, yearning violence just beneath her breast. "This is me telling you to not fucking do this. Not to me. Not now, not ever."

The words are coming faster now, an avalanche in the wake of the shock of having been asked so prettily to be a slave. That the choker was actually quite lovely made the pain all the worse, and the memory of that scathing beauty only fueled her exasperation.  _With all the strength of a raging fire,_ she thinks, casts her eyes to wear her Mulan DVD must still be playing in the den, and lets out quite a bit of frustration a hoarse laugh. 

"Do not treat me like a pet, Jim, because I will not act like a pet, not for you and not for anyone else. You can try and put a collar on me, and you can try and get a hold on me, you can try to do all of these things, Jim, but you will never," she hisses, "Not _ever_ , truly break me." The words and sentences are a bit disjointed now, fueled by vitriol and not by grammar, but the meaning comes out loud and clear: "And that is not a promise, Jim, no, that is a _fortune_ , this is your future: It is everything I am on a fucking platter, because THIS."

She kicks the box and it merely flops over, an unsatisfying amount of destruction. She keeps kicking it until the lid rips and spills the matching earrings onto the floor, and kicks again and again until both earrings are lost under different pieces of furniture, and then she turns toward the bed, her bed, infested by nightmares, and says directly in Jim's face. "Is not a thing you're going to do and get away with," she finishes. She is breathing hard, not quite able to catch her breath.

Jim stands abruptly from the bed, jarring Moran to a halt less than three paces away from the seething girl child. He lifts both hands to chest height - neck height on Johann, and Moran jerks forward minutely, as if anyone could stop him from hurting her.

But all the madman does is clap, slowly, yet somehow not mocking. "Very good," whispers Jim, and his words sound more sincere than his blank face professes. "I'm very proud of you, John. You've done so well. This was truly a very impressive little strop.

"Now put the collar on."

Johann stares at him like the deaf stare at written phonetic markers. There's a basic understanding that something is going on outside of her perception - she's not an idiot, she's just not comprehending the full meaning of Queen's English at the moment - and she has the feeling that some vital piece of information is being missed. Or ignored. By everyone.

So when the inclination hits, she just fucking explodes.

"Fuck you Jim, fuck everything you stand for, because you know what? I don't stand for you anymore. I am not going to help you, I'm not going to hurt you, because what the fuck could a twelve year old girl do to you?" Johann's laughing hysterically at this point, hands buried deep in her hair and tugging, pulling, and she can almost hear her own voice telling someone else to  _Stop messing with your hair, I like your curls, I can't like them once you've pulled them all out,_ but Johann's hair isn't curly, just wavy, and besides, Sherlock isn't here to throw her words in her face anymore. 

And there's the key. Sherlock's not there. Johann rocks to a stop on her toes and squeezes both hands into fists, hoping the roots don't come out bloody but  _god_ was Sherlock right when she said that a little bit of scalp pain helps to think. She's calmer in a moment, a bit of probing proves no harm done, and Johann closes her eyes and breathes until she can speak clearly without yelling. "Except leave," she whispers. She looks up at Jim's just staring blankly at her, broken, breaking,  _horrified_ that this was all coming to pass. 

And Johann isn't about to shut up now. 

"Right? That is what you're terrified of, isn't it? Me leaving you, just after I eat your fucking soul - devour what little you have left of one, at least, the burned out remnants of a heart - and then go run off into the distance like apparently your last boy did."

Jim goes pale instantly but Johann's too revved up at this point to do anything but hurt.

"Oh, think I didn't realize, did you? John, that one kid you did wrong by. And it must have been _bad,_ so very, very wrong, for you to still harbour so much guilt. So you're trying to do right by me, is that it? Using me to make up for your past deeds. And yet you failed, you fucking failed yet again, you bloody machine."

The word hits him like a dagger pierces flesh: Straight to the core, wounding, perhaps slaying the beast. She can practically see him begin to bleed and she revels in it, glows with the damage she's able to do. Moran just sits back and watches her attack and Jim's protest, a half-hearted, "I haven't failed yet," isn't even a cause for remorse on the girl's part. All she can feel is elation. 

"You know what, no, just no. Because if you think I could live inside these four walls, a flat of my own filled with nothing? Abso-bloody-lutely nothing here, nothing but you? Then you're wrong again. I can't. You. Are. Wrong. I need more to life than just living in a box, even a box where some person-- someone out there might have... would have been.... This 'John' kid sounds like someone who could handle you out there, but I'm not that someone. And I'm not out there. So please stop trying to make me into something I'm not."

A moment of silence falls across the flat like a slap to the face. It hurts to be part of, and Moran breaks it with a soft, "So what do you want us to do about it?" 

Us. The word reels through Johann with it's implication. Jim looks at the sniper with equal incredulity, stunned by the sentiment:  _You would still help me, even in this? Even now?_

Johann closes her eyes to close it all out: If you can't see it, it can't hurt you, the _Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy_ defense. She's shaking, but it's mostly suppressed laughter. "So. Please, dear fucking God, will you just leave. Me alone. Please." Her voice cracks again and she laughs, just the once, before getting a hold on herself. She stares at Jim until a full minute has passed and no one has moved so her eyes fall shut again. "Are you going to make me beg, Jim? Because I don't want to, but I will. I will."

There's a soft moment of silence, and then Jim shakes his head negatively. "No. No, I'll go. Can I get an otter kiss for the road?"

Johann laughs brokenly and rolls her eyes at him, for old times' sake. As if a few weeks was enough for them to separate 'old times' from 'new times' together, puntuated by a lack of oxygen right in the middle. "No otters here, Jim. Try a zoo."

He tries again, letting a little bit of warmth in his voice. "Some day, I hope we can learn to love each otter," but the joke comes out a bit flat.

"Not today, Jim. Not now."

"Goodnight," the sniper adds, but she waits to move until after Moran has shut the door with them both on the other side. The world doesn't look any better with eyes wide open. 

Jim doesn’t come back for days after that. But he does send Moran in with motivational posters to decorate her bedroom walls.

~¥~

 


End file.
